The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on the extreme left is not what it looks like, for they have no such in Urga but it houses a prayer-cylinder ]
A youthful lama turning one of the myriad prayer-cylinders of Urga. Many written prayers are pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent to saying all of them ]
Women, whose crippled feet make going to the shops difficult, do much of their shopping from the two-boxes-on-a-pole type of merchant, constant processions of whom tramp the highways of China ]
An itinerant blacksmith-shop, with the box-bellows worked by a stick handle widely used by craftsmen and cooks in China ]
The present one played in unusual luck. To an even greater extent than his predecessors he took advantage of his position to become the Don Juan of Mongolia, and among his many light-o’-loves there was one to whom he wished to stick—or who decided to stick to him. Being a god is very convenient at times. This one calmly overruled the time-honored law that lamas, and especially “Living Buddhas,” may not marry—though of course this verb does not exactly fit the case—and attached the minx to him for life. She seems to have some such power over men as did the old Empress Dowager of China, an impression borne out by her masterful face in such photographs of her as are extant. Not only did she succeed in saving her paramour from the usual fate in his youth, but she so strengthened his position that he is still on his deified throne at an age variously reckoned at from fifty to sixty. Some explain this survival in another way: there were, they say, to have been a fixed number of reincarnations of the Buddha, of which this is the last, after which, we are led to infer, the stainless soul will pass into Nirvana; and of course a few years more or less of hanging back from that blissful state can do no one any harm, least of all in the Orient, where the sense of time is so nearly paralyzed. Even among those who do not accept this view there are many who claim that there will never be another “Living Buddha” in Mongolia, for political rather than lamaistic reasons.
The fact is, probably, that while the masterfulness of his consort had something to do with the survival of the present reincarnation, the powerful clique about him has been willing to permit it because of his weakness, which has prevented him from ever grasping any real authority. Since his gallant youth he has been tainted with that dread disease so wide-spread among the Mongols, which not only makes him a semi-invalid easily manipulated by the real power behind his pseudo-divinity, but which left him some years ago stone-blind. Because he is too sacred to be touched by impious hands, there was no way of curing him, and now it is too late. Besides, the high lamas preferred him sickly and supine rather than well and strong, not to mention the almost complete ignorance among the Mongols of the real nature of their well nigh universal ailment.